by A M Homes
In the spring of 2005 I promise myself to once and for all deal with dead Ellen. I bring the boxes out of suspension, deliver them back to my apartment. Over time they have ripened; there is a certain smell to them—active disintegration. And again they sit, linger, become furniture. I stack things on top of them: suitcases, books, things of great weight. I am covertly holding them closed.
In the fall of 2005, twelve years after she found me, I take the boxes with me to Long Island for a weekend—just me and the four corrugated cardboard containers of dead Ellen. I take the boxes to the same small house where I stood in the yard and listened as my mother told me that my mother was dead. The house, then a rental, now is mine—a piece of something people call home. I take four boxes to the house on Long Island, a safe and controlled place—where like a bomb squad I plan to detonate them. I put the boxes on the kitchen table—my grandmother’s table. There is no escaping them now, no way around it.
I ask my family to stay home. I cannot do this with an audience, I have to be alone, able to sit with whatever I find. I need to not have to explain what can’t be explained—all that I am now of course trying to explain. I sit before the boxes, preparing to take inventory, giddy like a child playing the game of going through the mother’s purse, and then also feeling a more serious weight—I am the guardian, the keeper of what remains, and if I was not able to know her in life, perhaps I can crawl closer in death. Is there such a thing as intimacy after the fact? Will I find her in these boxes, will I know her any better after I am done? There is a piece of me that wishes I had taken more—perhaps if I’d taken ten boxes there’d be more of something, not just more of the same.
Box 1—the item on top is sheet music. “Hail to the Redskins.” I don’t know exactly why I was so surprised that this was the first item—was it because my biological father was a college football player, or that I could all too easily picture the two of them going to Redskins games while his wife was home with the kids? But it was especially interesting in light of other information I discovered: Ellen’s 1971 arrest for gambling—setting up a gaming table in the Sheraton Park Hotel and taking bets during a Cowboys-Redskins game—and an antitrust lawsuit that my father filed against the Redskins and pro football when he wanted to bring a new football team to town and ran into difficulty. And as soon as I see the sheet music, I also see myself at thirteen with braces in my bedroom in my parents’ house in Chevy Chase and my clarinet teacher, Mr. Schreiber, sitting beside me while I honked and screeched, stopping to lick the reed of my rented clarinet, wanting to get it right. Mr. Schreiber was the leader of the Redskins marching band—the Indian chief—who with a long headdress over his thick white hair would lead the band out onto the field at halftime.
Under the sheet music is a faux leather portfolio of photographs. I reflexively take a deep breath—preparing for what comes next—but on account of the dust, I have a coughing fit and have to go get a drink. The photos are the work of Harris & Ewing—the largest photo studio in Washington, photographers of presidents and high society—and apparently several are of my mother as an infant. In the first two portraits she is about four months old—there’s one serious, one smiling—and then she is somewhere near two, in a white dress with a big bow in her hair, white lace-up shoes, delicate and delighted—again and always looking off to the side. And then a little older, maybe three or four, posing with a big beautiful Dalmatian. And again—maybe part of the same shoot—in lederhosen or a pinafore. There is the palpable sense of her as Daddy’s little girl—devilish glimmer in the eye, she is shy and she is charming and she is defiant—and I have the strange sense that she knows more than she is able to fully understand. She is not a baby but a girl, and still and always there is a tentativeness and a need for confirmation—one can see it all. And for me there is a dull familiarity, an inescapable, unnamable relatedness—we do not look alike but in common. There is something similar in the arms, in the cheeks and the eyes—we have the same eyes.
There is a Harris & Ewing portrait of Ellen’s mother—cool, crisp, cold, proud of herself if no one else. The fact that these photos exist at all speaks to a certain kind of prosperity. The average person in the early 1940s did not have portraits taken of themselves and their children. It also reminds me of something Ellen once said to me—“Let’s have our portrait painted.” When she said it, the words seemed to exist in another world. Did she once have her portrait painted? Was it something promised that never happened? There is another photo taken on board a ship by someone else, of Ellen’s mother and a woman I assume is her mother’s mother, Mary Hannan—sometime in the 1930s. And then there is another of Mary Hannan long ago—a youthful, beautiful young woman.
Mixed between the pages there are random snapshots—Ellen playing on the beach, with her brother deep in the background. There is one that I assume is her father and brother in the backyard of their house. And then Ellen at about seven or eight standing outside the house with her brother—he is in his military school uniform, fists clenched at his side, his mother the photographer’s shadow a dark outline on the sidewalk—and by now her father is gone. And then Ellen is on a sofa next to her mother—adolescent, chubby, and excruciatingly uncomfortable. The images are frozen moments of family relation; they are documents taken to serve as proof and memory when there is no longer anyone to tell the story.
Things fall out—dozens of unopened bills with the yellow forwarding stickers from the post office, Notify Sender of New Address. Hers was a life lived in motion, spiraling down, running, barely one step ahead of herself. Envelopes slip to the floor—insurance overdue notice of $530 and another from a collection agency for $13,043.75 due to the office of comptroller of revenue. There is a set of legal papers relating to the reopening of a case filed by a family on behalf of their children to recover damages suffered by lead paint poisoning in buildings owned and managed by the defendants—specifically and especially Ellen Ballman.
There is a letter from Security National Bank: “This is to advise you that because of an unsatisfactory relationship on your account, we must request the account be closed within 15 days of this letter.” There is a commercial gas and electric bill due for over $10,000. And an envelope with an autumn 1995 Mark, Fore & Strike catalog, Fun Casual Clothing Since 1951. The odor wafting up from the box stings—it’s a little mothball, a little hamster cage, a little asthmatic, and definitely something turned sour. There’s a letter from the Maryland Department of Public Works dated June 6, 1984, a citation for general nuisance, vacant lot conditions, overgrowth of tall weeds and brush, scattered bottles, cans, and paper, a rat running along the front of the lot. The address, 4709 Langedrum Lane, Chevy Chase, Maryland. It is a few miles from where I grew up—and a place not known for rats. There is a notice of cancelation of insurance and another notice for delinquent taxes on a property on Seventh Street in Washington, D.C.
Under the photographs and all through the boxes there are notes, scraps of paper with little rhyming poems scrawled in pencil and pen and always signed “JC” ( Jack). Who was he to her—a lover, an old friend, a friend of her father’s? I know from my research that he was arrested more than once for gambling, that he owned a dry cleaning store and later lived in Atlantic City. And I know how sad Ellen was when he was ill and after he died. How did they meet? He had a wife, Katherine—I see her name on some of the documents and I find a card from her to Ellen. Clearly, he cared a great deal about Ellen—he once wrote me a letter, attesting to the validity of Ellen’s stories about her mother.
The boxes are like a paper trail version of This Is Your Life. Inside one of the boxes is a smaller box marked Master Bedroom. I peel cracked cellophane tape off. Inside is an open metal file—in each compartment a manila folder, each folder trouble, a case in and of itself, literally. The rack is filled with file after file of real estate transactions gone wrong, buildings bought and sold, backup loans, trusts, deeds, dozens of letters to lawyers, lots of back-and-forth, motions to counter, depositions
. Motion for leave to withdraw as counsel for plaintiff and for counterdefendant. There is nothing about this that is good news. At the back there is an old telephone message book—with duplicates. Call Rudy at work. Ms. Watson—important. Re Rose, verification was sent on wife last week. For Alex, re Lackey could he come by at 3pm today? It’s been years but I feel like returning the calls. Hi there, can you tell me about Ellen Ballman? How did you get to know her? Was she nice? Was she fair? Was she a good person? And then there is yet another file with a note on top. Please talk to Ellen about this! She’s annoying me to death about it. What does she want me to do except bring it to your attention!!! There is a piece of paper—on which someone has scrawled “For Your Information” and a notation that looks like “EB hours 300 as of 8-8-89.” (I take this to mean she has served three hundred hours of community service so far, but I could be wrong—maybe she had three hundred to go.) It is attached to a document that reads:
IN THE CIRCUIT COURT FOR MONTGOMERY
COUNTY MARYLAND
Criminal No *****
Upon consideration of Defendant’s Motion for Modification or Reduction of Sentence, the State having deferred to the Court’s ruling, and verification having been received that———has completed the terms of her probation, it is…
ORDERED, that the guilty finding against the Defendant in this case be, and the same hereby is, STRICKEN, and it is further ORDERED, that a disposition of Probation before Judgment under article 27, Section 641 be entered, and it is further ORDERED that supervised probation be, and the same hereby is TERMINATED, and case closed, and it is further ORDERED, that the hearing scheduled for August 5, 1989 be removed from the Court’s calendar.
I do not think that the above pertained to Ellen. I think it pertained to the woman who was sentenced along with her, and was sent to Ellen to prompt her to complete her community service. Curiously, the woman who was sentenced along with her was the same woman who called my mother to tell her—us—that Ellen was dead.
There are pharmacy receipts. I jot down the names of the drugs and make a note to look them up. Meprobamate, for short-term relief of the symptoms of anxiety. Tenormin, a beta blocker used to treat high blood pressure and angina pectoris. It is also used after a heart attack to improve survival. Dyazide, a potassium sparing and thiazide diuretic used to treat high blood pressure and swelling due to excess body water. Wygesic, an analgesic combination used to relieve pain. Premarin—conjugated estrogens used to reduce menopause symptoms. Imipramine, a tricyclic anti-depressant used to treat depression.
Just going through the list gives me chest pains. Maybe her father really did die of a heart attack—her maternal grandfather did at age fifty-three. Whatever was going on, it sounds complicated by her emotional state—did she have high blood pressure, did she have a heart condition? “It was all those damn diet pills,” my father said. “No matter what they said to her she wouldn’t stop taking the diet pills.” She was depressed, anxious, and dying when she checked herself out of the hospital, and she could have been saved.
Does any of this come as a shock? Not really. Among the first facts I had about my mother came from the private investigator—interestingly, an adopted woman who had never searched for her own family—who said, “In a nutshell she was indicted and driven out of town.” I never knew exactly what she was talking about, but it’s starting to make sense. I find articles about Ellen in the Washington Post—stories about her business practices, which amounted to her and a friend running a “chop shop” for documents in which they changed people’s income records, forged tax documents, and without customers’ knowledge qualified them for loans in excess of what they would otherwise be allowed to borrow. In court she admitted to falsifying documents for mortgages worth tens of millions of dollars and was sentenced to an eighteen-month suspended prison term, three years’ probation, and ordered to perform five hundred hours of community service.
What was surprising to me was how it all seemed to go on and on for years and years. The arrest and conviction were just the last straw. Not everything she did was illegal, but even that which wasn’t was done in the most difficult way possible—there was no grace. Did she plan these things? Was she scheming all along? Did she have a pathological need to make a deal, to do business in a certain way? Did she just not know how to do it the right way? It would seem that to do anything the way it was supposed to be done was fundamentally against her grain. There are times I think maybe she was a sort of Robin Hood and it’s okay, and then I think not. The possibility that it is pathological makes me want to know more about her father. I write to the FBI and request his FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act, only to find out that it was destroyed on schedule in 1971 according to government rules pertaining to document storage. But at least it confirms something—there was a file.
My mother as a kind of Bonnie and Clyde—always on the run, a Bonnie on her own always looking for Clyde, always looking for her father. And just as one worries about a genetic predisposition to a heart attack, I worry about a genetic predisposition to gambling, to midlife disaster. Will I suddenly become a criminal? I think about her in relation to the father—he too had midlife career disaster, not exactly criminal but certainly unbecoming. The bank he was president of went under largely due to a kind of good-old-boy mismanagement—the bank’s board favored loans to officers, directors, and their relatives above a responsibility to customers. I wonder if it was some sense of themselves as exempt from the rules that brought them together. Were they clever and crafty together? Did they take pleasure in their outlaw status—did they think they would somehow get away with it—what ever that might have meant? I think of Ellen in middle age—a woman with physical and emotional problems, cobbling it together, living alone in a kind of postmodern version of the Atlantic City portrayed in Louis Malle’s brilliant 1981 film.
And in the end, almost after the fact, I find an unopened letter from the Hebrew Home of Greater Washington in Rockville, Maryland, dated March 29, 1989. I open the letter, “There are no words which can fully express my sincere appreciation for your most generous gifts to the Hebrew Home. The Computers will allow us to do our work more effectively and ultimately, the residents of the Home will benefit.” The letter goes on to acknowledge the donation of four computers, five monitors, five keyboards, and a printer. I find myself wondering if this is a Robin Hood moment—all the more compelling because the letter was never opened.
There are no pictures of her at seventeen—the age when my father asked her to marry him. No pictures of her at twenty-two, pregnant with me, no pictures of her in the hospital—holding me, dressing me in my “going-home” outfit. Do those pictures exist, were they in some other box I didn’t find? What did she dress like in the 1950s, when she worked for my father at the Princess Shop? After all, that was the time of the French designer knockoff—Dior’s A-line, Givenchy’s sack, the boxy Chanel jacket, the swing coat, perfect for hiding a pregnancy. Did she like the new “modern” materials, nylon, Crimplene, and Orlon? Did she wear cone bras or all-in-one girdles? Was she the kind of teenager who dressed like an adult, or was she wearing poodle skirts, bobby sox, and going to drive-in movies? What was she thinking? This was the era of atomic anxiety, of Perry Como, Dean Martin, Connie Francis, and the beehive hairdo. It was the time of air-raid sirens and fallout shelters, the Rosenberg electrocutions and the McCarthy hearings. This was Washington, D.C., in the 1950s—and it was prime time for my mother.
I had hoped to find her in these boxes, to find a description of her childhood, the games she had played, clues to her troubled relationship with her mother and what she really knew about her father, her memories, the trinkets that she kept as talismans to protect or guide her. I hoped to have some idea of how she saw herself, what her hopes and dreams had been. I wanted to know her secrets.
I take the empty boxes to the dump, crack them in half, and toss them into the recycling bin—I am sending dead Ellen around once more. Maybe she’ll come bac
k as napkins or paper or some kind of shopping bag. I hurl the old metal file into one of the bins. It lands hard, the sound exploding like a grenade—everyone turns and looks. I shrug. I throw away the old mail, the scraps of paper, the bits and pieces, keeping enough to fill one box—a box to remind me. I put the box in the car and drive it back to New York, where it waits in a corner of my apartment, and then once again gets sent to ministorage.
It is 2005 and all I can think is that this is not how the woman who was so concerned about appearances would want to have been seen, this is not how the woman with thirty-two Chanel lipsticks would want to have been presented—but this is who she is and what she left behind.
Imagining my mother.
I think of my mother and imagine a young woman who hoped for more. I think of my mother and try to inhabit her experience.
In the 1950s ladies still wore hats and gloves and men wore overcoats. Young men and women met at socials, organized dances, chaperoned. The men hoped to go to college; the women hoped.
At Catholic school the nuns told Ellen very little about the birds and the bees and a lot about sin and all that could go wrong. Almost everything already had gone wrong for Ellen, but no one acknowledged that. She was surrounded by people who didn’t want to know, and quickly learned that faith got her nothing—in fact her belief that something would save her got her into trouble. At Catholic school she protected herself by insisting—at least to herself—that she was Jewish. Her mother was Catholic, her father was Jewish, and she always described herself as her father’s little girl.
Pin money. Her mother didn’t have much—whatever she had she got from her new husband, and she didn’t want to share. Ellen got a job working in the dress shop—one night, weekends, and holidays, and a good discount. She liked working, liked acting like a grown-up—helping the ladies with their shopping. They treated her in the motherly sort of way that she wished her own mother would.
